In recent years, automated attendants have become very popular. Many individuals or organizations use automated attendants to automatically provide information to callers and/or to route incoming calls. An example of an automated attendant is an automated directory assistant that automatically provides a telephone number, address, etc. for a business or an individual in response to a user's request.
Typically, a user places a call and reaches an automated directory assistant (e.g. an Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) system) that prompts the user for desired information and searches an informational database (e.g., a white pages listings database) for the requested information. The user enters the request, for example, a name of a business or individual via a keyboard, keypad or spoken inputs. The automated attendant searches for a match in the informational database based on the user's input and may output a voice synthesized result if a match can be found.
If an exact match is not found and/or if multiple entries are identified as possible matches, operator intervention is generally required for completion of the user's request for information. This process can be time consuming and a user may become frustrated if he or she is not able to readily obtain the desired information such as a telephone number of a business and/or individual. Additionally, if the user has a partial or erroneous name of the business, then the user may not be able to quickly find the desired information or may not find the requested information at all. This scenario may result in either wasted time and/or a lost business opportunity for the both the user and the intended business.